Blog

This week is Deaf Awareness Week 2018! One of our mottos here at CSW is that resilience is for everyone, and sometimes this means thinking outside the box and adapting services to make sure they’re inclusive for the 1 in 6 people in the UK with some form a hearing loss. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing, have you … Read More

A few weeks ago the CSW Resilience Team was awarded a 2017 Community Animal Welfare Footprint Gold award in Contingency Planning by the RSPCA but what does that mean, how did we achieve it and what happens now we’ve achieved Gold? The RSPCA have 6 award categories; the Innovator, Stray Dogs Footprint, Housing Footprint, Animal Activity Licensing Footprint, Special Recognition … Read More

There’s an old joke amongst fans of the classic sci-fi series Doctor Who that all you need to do to escape the Daleks is to run upstairs. The Doctor’s greatest enemies may have enough fire power to conquer the planet, but they’d need to install access ramps first! Of course the Daleks have come a long way since then and … Read More

This week the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO) have released several videos to help holiday-makers spot suspicious activity and know what to do in the unlikely event that they are caught up in a marauding fire arms attack abroad. You can read more about the initiative and watch the videos here

If you are an event planner we are happy to advise you on contingencies for your event. We can also offer exercising of event plans. The key to running safe and successful events is good planning. A Safety Advisory Group (SAG) is the best way to achieve this, bringing together event planners, emergency services and the Local Authority. HSE guidance … Read More

The rapid pace of modern day life doesn’t leave enough time to truly be neighbourly, and we are also often limited within our personal boundaries of privacy which is understandable. But there is also a need and a purpose to becoming neighbourly, the simple explanation being that the best chance of recovery after an emergency event is if there is … Read More

“citizenAID is the initiative of four deeply experienced UK civilian and military clinicians working in collaboration with industry to improve public resilience. When there is a shooting, stabbing or bomb explosion the initial priority will be public safety. This can delay the time before the emergency services are able to reach the injured. citizenAID enables the general public to be … Read More

As we near the end of Business Continuity Awareness Week it’s a good time to reflect on how you can become more resilient. If you’ve been keeping up with our twitter then you will have seen some of our posts to help you, as an individual or a business, be as Cyber Resilient as possible. It’s important to remember that … Read More

Business continuity and the ability to just keep swimming! As some of you may know it’s business continuity awareness week 2017, an event which runs from the 15th -19th May and this year’s theme is cyber resilience! Being a part of the CSW Resilience team we understand that the cyber realm is an ever evolving and growing part of the … Read More

Today is the big day… today CSW Resilience launch our Prepared Pets awareness campaign, as many of you may be aware April 2017 is National Pet Month and although local authorities are governed by the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) our team has chosen to extend the duties and responsibilities outlined in the Act to encompass animal companions. We acknowledge that … Read More

The Warwickshire Flood Summit, held to inform residents of the ongoing work to fight flooding in the county, was held in Stratford-on-Avon on 1 April. Warwickshire County Council organised the event, which featured the Environment Agency (EA), Severn Trent Water and the National Flood Forum. The county’s residents were updated on all the work currently in progress both to prevent … Read More

‘Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man’ – Dalai Lama When asked what an emergency is it becomes very easy to overlook what the definitions and parameters of an emergency plan are for instance, the Civil Contingencies Act, 2004 –a document which underpins the foundations of the emergency planning world- states that the emergency … Read More

We’re currently planning a large-scale emergency scenario exercise. It is coming up in two weeks, so it’s getting close to cruch time for the planning team. Luckily, it’s not the first time at this rodeo for our team, in fact we typically conduct a “live” exercise once a year. Often ran by different members of the team, and in … Read More

As I was sorting out one of our supply cupboards earlier (such a glamorous job!) I came across an envelope labelled ‘Exercise Pictures, 1998’. The CSW Resilience Team was founded in 2011 with the joining together of Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire’s emergency planning teams, but prior to that each of the three Local Authorities had their own resilience provision, so … Read More

The world of Emergency Management and Resilience owes many of its successes to the principles of JESIP (joint emergency services interoperability program) which have encouraged primarily, the ability of Police, Fire & Rescue, Ambulance and Local Authority services to work together when responding to major multi-agency incidents- which can range from events such as the July 7th London attacks to … Read More

A flood is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, to quote Blackadder, if you’ve got a moment, it’s a twelve-story crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpetting throughout, 24-hour portrage and an enormous sign on the roof saying this is a large crisis. Ok so floods may not always be a twelve-story crisis, or have a roof to put … Read More

So we’ve all seen the dad’s army sketch and the infamous words ‘keep calm and carry on’, it’s so popular you may well have a picture hanging up in your home or office with this mantra, we have one in our emergency centre. (Or the bunker as we like to call it) This sparked us to think about exactly what … Read More

As the lead for ‘warning & informing’ I spend a lot of my time trying to think up new ways to engage with people and promote personal resilience far and wide, this blog being one such example. Warning and informing is basically a fancy way of saying talking to people about risks and being prepared. The biggest challenge I face … Read More

Emergency Planning Teams may have a bit of a reputation of being pessimistic old men in cardigans getting kicks out of planning disaster scenarios and watching them go wrong from behind their desks. However you might be pleasantly surprised to hear, that was some time ago. The modern emergency planner is a Category 1 responder, we have as much right … Read More

If you could imagine, a rubber ducky inside a plastic paddling pool full of water, in an emergency control centre made during the cold war. This image might not automatically trigger thoughts of a professional business continuity exercise, however that’s exactly what it was. As a local authority our approach to business continuity is a little different; 1) because we … Read More